The Defense Department’s approach to an increasingly dynamic global environment and its recent focus on great-power competition is not a lead-up to war among powerful nations, but rather is a way to achieve comprehensive stability, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said here today.
Work spoke during a forum titled “Securing Tomorrow,” hosted by the Washington Post and conducted by the newspaper’s foreign affairs columnist and author David Ignatius.
The third offset strategy is a long-range plan that acknowledges the re-emergence of Russia and the concurrent rise of China, both as great powers in competition with the United States. Work said Defense Secretary Ash Carter wanted the defense offset program to focus on top competitors Russia and China, although other department priorities include Iran, North Korea and the long-term fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and other violent extremists.
“As a competitive strategy,” Work said, “we will try to approach this problem without trying to match our potential competitors tank for tank, airplane for airplane, missile for missile [or] person for person. We will try to offset their strengths in a way that gives us an advantage.”
Third Offset Strategy
The first offset strategy took place in the 1950s when the United States gained the ability to use tactical nuclear weapons to deter a conventional attack on Western Europe. The second took place in the early to mid-1970s when the Soviet Union gained strategic nuclear parity with America and the United States went after conventional weapons with precision-guided weapons.
The third offset strategy, Work said, “is not about us planning for war against great powers. …The goal is to achieve comprehensive stability, reduce any incentive for preemption, and if we do come to blows, end it quickly before we trip over a nuclear threshold.”
The strategy’s purpose is to identify technologies, operational and organizational constructs and new operational concepts needed to fight future adversaries, he explained, and a big part of that is to identify, develop and field breakthrough technologies, and use current capabilities in new ways.
“This is a much more dynamic environment in which a lot of militarily relevant technologies are coming through the commercial sector -- artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, biotechnology” and others, Work said.
Strategy Technology
Deep-learning machines, autonomous vehicles and devices, and space technologies are among the advances being studied and rolled out as part of the third offset strategy.
“We are absolutely certain that the use of deep-learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIL as a network and better understanding about how to target it precisely and lead to its defeat,” Work said.
During a recent visit to a Silicon Valley company, the deputy secretary saw a machine that took in data from Twitter, Instagram and many other public sources to show the July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down in real time.
“They had a … shot of the airplane taking off, they had another shot of a Russian surface-to-air missile vehicle with a serial number on it, and they had a picture of a contrail in the area where the airplane was shot down,” Work explained. “They had another picture of the same surface-to-air missile launcher moving out of the area [without] a missile on one of its rails.”
With deep-learning machines and computers that are designed to help analysts understand the connections they're seeing, analysts will provide better input to commanders, who will better understand the effects they want to achieve, Work said. “So we're very excited about the prospect of working these things into our fight,” he added.
Autonomous Systems
Driverless trucks and other ground vehicles that drive on and off paved roads will take time to develop, Work said, adding that he would expect to see unmanned wingmen in the air before seeing unmanned convoys on the ground.
“The Air Force has a concept called the Loyal Wingman, where you take an F-16, make it totally unmanned -- F-16 is a fourth-generation fighter -- and pair it with an F-35, a fifth generation … battle network node, and those two operate together,” he said.
Work said he also expects to see unmanned systems undersea and on the sea surface, and unmanned systems delivering things to soldiers on the battlefield from the air. “We've already demonstrated that in Afghanistan,” he said, “and this is something that is inexorable. It is going to happen.”
The deputy defense secretary described autonomy as “nothing more than saying we're going to delegate authority to an unmanned system.” But, he added, “we will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision. The only time we'll delegate [such] authority [to a machine] is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare.”
Distributed Space Systems
Work said the United States has long considered space a sanctuary for its big, expensive, enormously capable and enormously vulnerable space systems. Over the next decade or so, he said, “we will [take] the capabilities in these exquisite systems and distribute them amongst smaller systems that have fuel that allows them to maneuver away from anti-satellite capabilities.”
The first operational and organizational construct of the third offset strategy is something Carter initially called JICSPOC, Work said -- the Joint Interagency and Combined Space Operation Center.
“It is designed to look up and [see] what the threats are doing and how we would move our assets to make sure that we retain the capabilities,” he said.
Doves in Orbit
The department also will tap into innovative commercial space activities like those underway at a company Work visited called Planet Labs, based in San Francisco. The company will have 150 small satellites, and it has a 15-inch reflecting telescope with a camera on it, the deputy secretary said. It will send the 150 satellites it calls “doves” into a sun-synchronous orbit, and the flock will take pictures straight down, day in and day out in daylight.
“It will be a line scanner of the entire Earth, because in a sun-synchronous orbit, every single portion of the Earth will rotate under this orbit. They're going to bring down 10 terabytes of data a day, and we will use deep-learning machines to say what is happening on the globe,” Work said.
An adversary would have a difficult time attacking 150 very small satellites, he added, so using commercial technology and disaggregating the constellation will allow the flock to survive any kind of concerted attack and continue providing support to warfighters.
(Follow Cheryl Pellerin on Twitter @PellerinDoDNews)